Hearing impaired listeners find it extremely hard to understand speech in complex acoustic scenes such as multitalker environments where targets and interferers are often in separate locations. Knowing where to listen makes significant contributions to speech understanding in these situations. Inter-aural level differences (ILDs), which are differences between levels of a sound as perceived in the two ears of a listener, provides for important cues to spatial hearing. Dynamic range compression of audio signal as performed in hearing assistance devices reduces volume of louder sounds while increasing volume of softer sounds. Dynamic range compression operating independently at the ears reduces ILDs, by providing more gain to the softer sound at one ear and less gain to the louder sound at the other ear. There is a need for providing compressive gain and simultaneously preserving ILD spatial cue in multitalker backgrounds.